I will talk with other editors here on my talk page. If the message is not about an article I am working on, I will read and then may delete the message. Thank you and Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) (talk) 15:59, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Hello, Barbara, and thank you for your work here. I noticed that you created some article talk pages that contained only something saying that they were talk pages for the associated articles. It's not necessary to create talk pages until there is some actual discussion. If you really want to create them, we have the template {{talk header}} for that purpose. Thanks, and feel free to ask any questions you have. --Auntof6 (talk) 03:03, 11 August 2017 (UTC)

@Auntof6:, I am not sure, but it appears that one gets a notification when there are changes made to User-talkpages, but not when there are changes to User-pages? Ottawahitech (talk) 21:40, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech: Yes. If you want to be notified about changes to any page other than your own talk page, you have to watch the page. If you want to discuss further, please do so on my talk page, since this doesn't seem related to the discussion in this section. --Auntof6 (talk) 01:13, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects. We will be starting with Wikipedias, but we hope these changes will benefit every community.

8 ideas we consider: tell us what you think about them!

We are considering new features to build, that could retain new editors in mid-size Wikipedias. We will be testing new ideas in Czech and Korean Wikipedias, and then we'll talk to more communities (yours!) about adopting the ideas that work well.

We want to hear about what is working and what is not working for new contributors in your wiki. We also want to hear any reactions, questions, or opinions on our work. Please post on the team’s talk page, in any language!

Learn more about us

You can visit our team page to find out why our team was formed and how we are thinking about new editors, and our project page for detailed updates on the first project we'll work on.

The Growth Team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Our plan for the next quarter is ready

After consulting with many communities on the best ways to increase retention, we will focus during the next 3 months on these projects:

Understanding first day: to see what new editors do right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.

Personalized first day: this idea will also help us learn a lot about new editors by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process. We hope to share initial results in December.

Focus on help desk: we plan to invite or redirect people to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

The Growth team's objective is to work on software changes that help retain new contributors in mid-size Wikimedia projects.

Two Growth team projects to be deployed in next two weeks

We will be deploying the "Understanding first day" and "Personalized first day" projects on Czech and Korean Wikipedias in the coming weeks. See the new project pages below for full details on the projects, and our project updates page for their progress.

Understanding first day: learn about the actions new editors take right after creating their accounts. We will be careful with user privacy, and we hope to share initial results in December.

Personalized first day: learn about new editors' objectives by adding some optional questions to the new editor’s registration process, and personalizing their onboarding. We hope to share initial results in December.

Third Growth team project begins

Focus on help desk: direct newcomers to the local help desks where they can ask questions to help them make their first edits. We hope to have an initial experiment running in December.

Best practices for helping newcomers

We are going to direct newcomers to help desks. But what's the best way to reply to a newcomer there? We have gathered some best practices for successful interactions, based on community experiences and some external documentation. The page has also been reviewed by some experienced community members who suggested some changes. That page is now open for translations. Comments and suggestions are still welcome!

The survey is now being shown to half of new users (A/B test). Responses are being recorded in the database. We'll report on initial results during December.

We are planning to test a second version of the survey, called "Variation C", which we think will maximize the number of users who complete the survey and stay on the wiki.

The original objective of this project was to give newcomers the materials they need to achieve their goals, and so now we are currently planning how we will use the information collected in the welcome survey to personalize the newcomer's experience. We hope community members will read our current thinking and join the conversation here. Some of the plans we are considering include:

Making it easy for newcomers to see editing activity around the topic areas in which they indicated that they're interested.

Connecting interested newcomers to experienced editors.

Surfacing the help content most relevant to the reason for which the newcomers created their accounts.

Understanding first day (EditorJourney) was deployed on November 15 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias. It has been done after a longer security review and final testing than expected. Data is now being recorded for all new users on those wikis, and we've been auditing the data and preparing to make initial reports during December. Stay tuned for the next newsletter!

Help panel is under construction

Focus on help desk (help panel) is planned to be deployed during the week of January 7 on both Czech and Korean Wikipedias.

In addition to giving the ability to ask a question, the help panel will also contain a set of links to existing help content. Our ambassadors on Czech and Korean Wikipedias are determining the right initial set of most helpful links in this task.

We began the "Personalized first day" project with the welcome survey so that we could gather information about what newcomers are trying to accomplish. The next step is to use that information to create experiences that help the newcomers accomplish their goal – actually personalizing their first day. We asked for community thoughts in the previous newsletter, and after discussing with community members and amongst our team, we are now planning two projects as next steps: "engagement emails" and "newcomer homepage".

Engagement emails: this project was first discussed positively by community members here back in September 2018, and the team how has bandwidth to pursue it. The idea is that newcomers who leave the wiki don't get encouraged to return to the wiki and edit. We can engage them through emails that send them the specific information they need to be successful – such as contact from a mentor, the impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?

Newcomer homepage: we developed the idea for this project after analyzing the data from the welcome survey and EditorJourney datasets. We saw that many newcomers seem to be looking for a place to get started – a place that collects their past work, options for future work, and ways to learn more. We can build this place, and it can connect to the engagement emails. The content of both could be guided by what newcomers say they need during their welcome survey, and contain things like contact from a mentor, impact of their edits, or task recommendations. Please read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. Do you think this is a good idea? Where could we go wrong?

We have published initial reports on each of the team's first two projects. These reports give the basic numbers from each project, and there are many more questions we will continue to answer in future reports. We're excited about these initial findings. They have already helped us define and design parts of our future projects.

The help panel was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on January 10. Over the past four weeks:

About 400 newcomers in each wiki have seen the help panel button.

About 20% of them open up the help panel.

About 50% of those who open it up click on one of the links.

About 5% of Czech users ask questions, and about 1% of Korean users ask questions.

We think that the 20% open rate and 50% click rate are strong numbers, showing that a lot of people are looking for help, and many want to help themselves by looking at help pages. The somewhat lower numbers of asking questions (especially in Korean Wikipedia) has caused us to consider new features to allow people to help themselves. We're going to be adding a search bar to the help panel next, which will allow users to type a search that only looks for pages in the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.

The Growth team has been working on features to increase new editor retention for the last seven months. We have made a lot of progress and learned a lot, and we've just finished planning for our next three months. During the next three months, we're going to focus on iterations of the help panel and the newcomer homepage. We have decided not to start the engagement emails project, because we think that we will be able to do better work by improving the projects we have already started. Specifically, these are our team goals:

The newcomer homepage is our current major project. We hope that community members can read over the project page, and comment on its discussion page with any ideas, questions, or concerns. You can see in the accompanying mockup how we are thinking about the homepage.

We have recently decided on the specifications for an initial version that we can deploy and iterate on:

Shown in the User space

Desktop only (mobile comes next)

Four modules

Help module: help links and ability to ask help desk questions

Mentorship module: all newcomers assigned a mentor to whom they can ask questions

Impact module: shows the number of pageviews for pages the newcomer edited

Account completion module: gives some very simple recommendations of how to get started (add an email, start your user page)

Layout not yet personalized for each user

We're currently running live user tests on this configuration. Future work will include adapting the homepage for mobile, working on a task recommendation module, and considering how to encourage newcomers to visit their homepage.

Screenshot from Vietnamese Wikipedia showing the help panel open on the Community Portal, including the "search" bar.

During the last month, the help panel was deployed on Vietnamese Wikipedia, adding it to Czech and Korean Wikipedias.As of 2019-03-14:

2,425 newcomers have seen the help panel

422 of them have opened it

175 have clicked links

27 have run searches

40 have asked questions

We have been analyzing the data around usage, and we'll be publishing numbers in the coming weeks. At a high level, we see at least some users are being helped by the panel, with many clicking on links, running searches, and asking questions. We do not yet see any problems that have arisen from the help panel. Therefore, we think that the help panel is generally a positive feature – though data is still coming that will allow us to see its numerical impact. If other wikis are interested in using the help panel, please contact us on our team's talk page, in the language of your choice.

Over the past month, we have iterated on the help panel to take into account the usage patterns we are seeing. You can see in the accompanying image how the help panel currently looks.

We added a search capability, in which users can search the Help and Wikipedia namespaces.

The help panel was previously available whenever a newcomer was in "edit" mode. We are now also showing the help panel when a newcomer is in "read" mode on a page in the Help, Wikipedia, or User namespaces.

We want to see whether users find the "search" useful. If so, we may spend time on improving search results. We're also looking forward to learning whether exposing the help panel in "read" mode in more namespaces will increase usage.￼

The main feature that the team has been working on over the last month is the newcomer homepage. This feature gives newcomers a place on the wiki to get oriented, learn about editing, and see their impact (see the accompanying screenshot from Test Wikipedia). We intend to release this feature to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias on May 2nd.

Like the other Growth team features, this will be deployed in a controlled experiment, in which half of newcomers will have access to their homepage and half will not. Users with the feature will be able to access it by clicking their username at the top of their browser, and it will only be available on desktop -- not mobile. Experienced users who want to see their homepage will be able to turn it on in their preferences.

Wikis receiving the newcomer homepage can expect these things:

Additional questions will come to the help desk from the "help module" on the homepage.

Mentors who have signed up for the "mentorship module" will start to receive questions on their user talk pages.

The most important piece developed for the homepage over the last month is the "start module", which gives newcomers clear actions to take when they are new: add/confirm their email, go through a tutorial, start their user page. We learned about the need for this module from user tests last month. The next priorities for the newcomer homepage are:

Mobile design: to work well in mobile browsers, the homepage needs a separate design and engineering. See the accompanying mockups for potential mobile designs.

Features for discovery: only about 15% - 30% of newcomers will discover their homepage by clicking their username at the top of their browser. We are going to be designing additional ways for newcomers to find out about it.

Additional modules: the initial version contains some of the simpler modules. Potential upcoming modules include task recommendations and a feed of activity on the wiki.

Help panel leading indicators: our team published data on the help panel's initial performance. The evaluation exposes some areas for improvement, but we think the help panel's behavior so far is healthy and that it is not having a negative impact on the wikis. We will be publishing additional data, making plans, and asking for community thoughts around the future of the help panel over the course of the next two weeks. If you are interested in trying out the help panel on your wiki, please let us know on our team's talk page.

Long term plans: the team had a week of planning meetings, in which we talked about some longer-term ideas for Growth work. Some of the top ideas are: to extend the newcomer homepage to help user's build their identity through a user profile, and to revisit the "engagement emails" project that the team put on hold. Over the next month, we will be asking for community conversation around how the team can spend our time in the next fiscal year, that starts in July.

Call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019Edit

Welcome to a special newsletter from the Growth team! This special newsletter is not about Wikimedia Foundation Growth team projects. Instead, it is a call for submissions for the Community Growth space at Wikimania 2019. We think that many people who receive this newsletter may have something valuable to contribute to this space at Wikimania. We haven't translated the newsletter, because Wikimania's language is English.

Since you are interested b Growth team projects, and potentially involved in welcoming newcomers initiatives on your wiki, we would like to invite you to submit a proposal to the Community Growth space because of the actions you’ve done around newcomers on wikis. The deadline for submission is June 1. See below for Community Growth submission topics and session formats. Topics and sessions have to be in English.

In the Community Growth space, we will come together for discussions, presentations, and workshops that address these questions:

What is and is not working around attracting and retaining newcomers?

How should Wikimedia activities evolve to help communities grow and flourish?

How should our technology and culture evolve to help new populations to come online, participate and become community members?

Recommended topics: please see this link for the list for the list of recommended topics. If you do not plan to submit a proposal, you can also suggest additional topics here. If your topic does not fit into our space, remember that there are 18 other spaces that could welcome you sharing your knowledge and perspective.

Types of session. We prefer sessions that are participatory, interactive, promote conversations, and give a voice to parts of our movement that are heard less often. Please see this link for the list of recommended session formats.

Poster submissions. Posters are also a good way to introduce a topic, or show some results of an action. Please consider submitting one!

More information about the Community Growth space, topics, and submission formats is available on the proposal page.

A newcomer homepage on Czech Wikipedia (displayed in English language)

The newcomer homepage was deployed in Czech and Korean Wikipedias on May 6 for desktop users. It is deployed in an A/B test, so that half of newcomers have access to the homepage and half do not. They access it by clicking on their username in their personal tools along the top of the window.

After about a month of usage, we see a few interesting trends. We think that the usage is going well so far, as we continue to work on the feature

About half of users who visit the homepage click on a link or button.

About half of users visit the homepage more than once, with about a fifth of users visiting on multiple days.

Users are interacting with all the different modules on the page -- there is no clear favorite.

Users have been asking questions to their mentors -- but not on the help desk.

Features to aid discovery: only a minority of newcomers who have a homepage will find their homepage on their own. The team is designing features that help newcomers learn where to find their homepage. The most important feature will point to the homepage link using a GuidedTour.

User tests showed that the most important thing to add to the homepage are clear task recommendations to help newcomers get started with editing right away. This is the module that we will be working on next.

The Growth team has been working since September 2018, and we're now planning for the work we'll be doing for the next fiscal year, which begins in July.

Though we have not yet developed a feature that clearly increases growth in our target wikis, we believe that the features we have been developing have high potential to increase growth if we continue to work on them.

Therefore, the team will continue to work on the features we have started, and we will develop related features that improve the overall newcomer experience. These features may include:

Improvements to how newcomers can build their user pages and develop their on-wiki identity. See initial notes here.

Improvements to how newcomers receive notifications on-wiki and through email, so that they quickly find out if other users are contacting them.

Processes that help newcomers get awards or recognition for good work.

Ways for newcomers to see the activity on the wiki and find others who share their interests.

We will start discussions with communities to help us define these ideas before we work on them.

The Growth team has existed for about one year. During that time, we have developed several features that we think can help increase retention. Though we are still gathering data to detect scientifically whether the features increase retention, we think that some of the features are ready to be deployed on more wikis that want to experiment with them. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible.

Then, go through the checklist to start the process of getting these features:

Help panel: allow newcomers to find help and ask questions while they edit.

Welcome survey: learn what topics and types of edits newcomers are interested in.

EditorJourney: learn what workflows newcomers go through on their first day.

Indicator that encourages users to look at their Notifications for responses to their questions

A new quarter of the year has started, and the team has set our goals for the next three months. The most important goals are:

Newcomer homepage: increase activity through a task recommendations module. Now that we have seen several weeks of positive activity on the newcomer homepage, we think that the most important thing to add is a way for newcomers to find tasks to work on. The challenge will be recommending the right kind of tasks at the right point of their journey.

Newcomer homepage: increase feature discovery rate by 100%. Right now, only 20% - 30% of newcomers ever visit their homepage. We want to double that number by making sure all newcomers know how to find it.

Help panel: increase usefulness through improvements to affordance, search, and UX flow. We have looked closely at data and anecdotes from the usage of the help panel, and we plan to pursue specific improvements to increase its effectiveness (see accompanying image of a feature that helps newcomers find responses to their questions).

Wikimania is coming up next month, which includes a "Community Growth" space. We hope to see people from all communities there to talk about how to bring newcomers into our movement.

We have started to deploy features to our team's fourth target wiki: Arabic Wikipedia. That wiki is the biggest one we target, it has a high percentage of mobile users, and also is our first right-to-left language. This will help us make sure that our features are valuable for as many types of users as possible.

Button to help newcomers find their homepage from their empty Contributions page

The mobile version of the newcomer homepage was deployed to Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. Now, newcomers can access their homepage from both desktop and mobile devices.

We have published our first set of data about the performance of the newcomer homepage. In summary, we are happy with the homepage's performance so far. We see about half of visitors clicking on something, and the majority of them returning to the homepage multiple times.

Because we see positive usage of the homepage, we will deploy several small features in the next two weeks that help more newcomers discover their homepage (see accompanying image of a feature that helps newcomers discover their homepage from their empty Contributions page).

As listed in our goals above, we'll be starting to focus on adding task recommendations to the newcomer homepage. We'll be publishing early thoughts on this feature so that community members can give their thoughts and advice.

Growth team features are now fully deployed in Arabic Wikipedia and Basque Wikipedia (along with Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias). If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then, go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.

We have deployed features that help newcomers find their newcomer homepage. These features were successful, and more than doubled the number of newcomers who find their homepage. In Czech Wikipedia, 72% of newcomers visit their homepage and in Korean Wikipedia, 49% of newcomers visit their homepage.

Several members of the Growth team attended Wikimania in Stockholm. We helped organize a conference track around Community Growth, presented about our team's work, and had many conversations with community members from around the world.

How to match to interests? Research shows that users are more likely to work on articles that are related to their interests. We are currently prototyping methods to ask newcomers their interests and then find articles that match.

How to guide the newcomer? Once a newcomer has selected a recommended article, they will need guidance on how to complete the edit. We have decided to use the help panel to provide that guidance while the newcomer edits.

We are currently engineering on this feature, and we recently published notes from user tests that give mostly positive feedback.

You can explore the design for newcomer tasks in these interactive mockups. We hope to hear from you about your thoughts on the project talk page. Do you think this could be helpful for newcomers? What are we missing?

Expanding to more wikis: the team is preparing to deploy Growth features to Ukrainian and Hungarian Wikipedias. Wikis that already have the features are Czech, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Basque Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together if your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.

Mentor training: we tried out our first training for mentors with the Czech community, so that experienced users can build skills that help them retain newcomers.

The help panel was first deployed to newcomers in January 2019, and we have now finished analyzing data to determine its impact. A brief summary is below, and more in-depth information can be found here (in English).

In summary, although we have seen a good amount of usage of the help panel, the help panel has not shown an increase in activation (whether a user makes their first edit) or retention (whether a user returns to edit again).

This is a disappointing result, and our team has discussed potential reasons for the result and ideas for the future. Although we have many ideas for how to improve the help panel, we have decided to keep our attention on the newcomer homepage and newcomer tasks projects for the coming months.

We'll be using the help panel as part of the newcomer tasks project: using it to guide newcomers while they complete suggested edits.

The first version of the newcomer tasks workflow (V1.0) will be deployed in the next weeks on our 4 priority wikis. This version will suggest articles to edit based on maintenance templates. In this first version, we expect many newcomers to initiate the workflow, but not many to select articles to edit or complete edits. We expect future versions of the feature to increase those behaviors.

We're excited about this project because the majority of newcomers visit their newcomer homepage, and this will be the first element of the homepage that clearly asks the newcomer to start editing.

These are the next two versions of the feature, which are already being planned:

V1.1 (topic matching): will allow newcomers to choose topics of interest (such as Art, Music, Sports, or Technology) to personalize their suggestions. After evaluating several approaches, we have decided to use a new ORES model built by the WMF Scoring team. The model will automatically identify the topic area of each article. We expect this to increase how often newcomers select articles to edit.

V1.2 (guidance): once newcomers arrive on an article to edit, we will use the help panel to provide guidance about how to complete the editing task. We expect this to increase how many newcomers actually complete productive edits.

A training for mentors has been published. The training was first tried with the Czech community, and went well.

Growth team features have been deployed to Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Armenian Wikipedias. If your community is enthusiastic about welcoming newcomers, we encourage you to contact us so that we can verify together whether your wiki is eligible. Then you can go through the checklist to start the process of configuring the features.

The results from our user tests showed us that newcomers are likely to do more suggested edits if they can choose articles related to a topic that they're interested in, such as "science", "music", or "sports".

On January 21, we deployed topic matching on our pilot wikis. Newcomers are now using it. We expect it to cause more newcomers to try suggested edits, and to keep making more of them.

In the coming weeks, we will be making improvements to the accuracy of the algorithm used to topic matching, which is part of the ORES project.

Prototype of how the help panel will "peek" from the bottom of the page to offer guidance on mobile.

Because we are seeing positive results from newcomer tasks, the Growth team plans to concentrate our efforts on improving the workflow and encouraging more newcomers to use it.

Guidance: next, we will be using the help panel to provide guidance to newcomers as they do suggested edits, and to prompt them to do another edit after completing their first one. In user tests for this feature, demo videos were one of the favorite features, and we will think about how these might be added.

Starting the workflow: only about 20% of newcomer who visit their homepage begin the newcomer tasks workflow. We are going to be trying out different layouts of the homepage to encourage more newcomers to try newcomer tasks.

Additional task types: we are researching methods to recommend more specific tasks to newcomers, such as specific links to add, or images that could be added to articles from Commons.

Sketch of an idea for a structured workflow for adding links to an article. The goal is to help newcomers edit at high volume.

We are looking for community input on a new project to make it easy for newcomers to make real article edits.

In our previous newsletter, we talked about the productive edits coming from the newcomer tasks feature. Those good results have continued: about 900 newcomers made over 5,000 suggested edits so far. We've learned that newcomers are interested in receiving suggested edits.

Now, we are thinking about how to supply them a feed of easy edits that will help more of them be successful quickly. We have a new idea called "structured tasks". This would aim to break down edits into steps that are easy for newcomers and easy on mobile devices.

In the past, certain kinds of editing tasks have been structured. For instance, adding categories through HotCat. Now, we are thinking about how to structure the editing of articles. The goal is to allow newcomers can make large content additions, especially from their mobile devices.

Please visit the project page and respond to the discussion questions listed on the talk page. You are welcome to show this project to others in your community. You can help by translating the materials to your language so that more voices can join in. We will be having this conversation until June 18.

We have expanded to six new wikis, and are looking for more interested communities.

In the last two months, we deployed Growth features to six new wikis: Ukrainian, Serbian, Hungarian, Armenian, and Basque Wikipedias, and French Wiktionary. Newcomers from these wikis have already contributed over 600 edits through Growth features.

We want to expand to more wikis in the coming months, and we are looking for interested communities. French Wikipedia already agreed and will be the next one to join the experiment. We will contact several other wikis in the coming weeks to offer them to participate.

Do you think the Growth Team features would be a good addition to your wiki? Please see this translatable summary of Growth features. You can share with your communities and start a discussion. Then, please contact us to begin the process!

In March, we deployed an upgrade to the topic matching in newcomer tasks. The current version offers 39 different topics using new ORES models.

In April, we completed an A/B test of two homepage configurations. We learned that more newcomers will attempt suggested edits if the module is made more prominent. We are implementing those learnings in our next test. See the full results here.

We are currently working on guidance for newcomer tasks. It will use the help panel to guide newcomers through completing easy edits.

Our next step is to create new configurations of the homepage. The goal is to encourage more newcomers to begin doing suggested edits.